“Copperhead” dramatizes the ’60s antiwar movement—1860s, that is.

Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually; death’s threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war’s experiences. … for those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death.

— Drew Gilpin Faust

In the living room of his house in Rappahannock, Virginia, filmmaker Ron Maxwell brings up the 2008 book from which that quote is drawn: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. We’re talking about the costs of the war Maxwell—director of “Gods and Generals” and “Gettysburg”—has made a career of interpreting. “All of the numbers are being revised upwards” since Faust’s book came out five years ago, he says—by 20 percent in 2012 alone.

His new movie concerns those Northern Democrats who adjudged the costs too high and called for a settlement with the South. They were dubbed “Copperheads” by their opponents and likened to the venomous snake. It was a name they accepted, and now it’s the name of the new film. Produced and directed by Maxwell and written by antiwar populist historian (and TAC columnist) Bill Kauffman, “Copperhead” is about a small town in upstate New York where divided opinions about the war threaten to tear the community asunder. Based on an 1893 novella by Harold Frederic of Utica—whom Maxwell calls the “Charles Dickens of upstate New York”—it focuses on two families, one Copperhead and one abolitionist.

It is a film about the Northern home front: there is not a single battle scene or slave, though characters returning from the South talk of both. “The whole point is that the war intrudes on the people where they are,” Maxwell says.

“Copperhead” opens in 1862 to six boys traipsing across a field and talking about a distant war. In time two will be killed in battle, two will be maimed, and two will survive unscathed, albeit only in the sense that they’re unwounded. The movie is narrated by one who stayed behind, an orphan named Jimmy (Josh Cruddas), who lives with the Copperhead Beeches. The father of the family, Abner Beech, is according to Kauffman “neither a doughface nor a congenital contrarian: he is, rather, a Jefferson-Jackson agrarian in the Upstate New York Democratic tradition.”

Abner’s son, Jeff (Casey Brown), named after his political icon Thomas Jefferson, is in love with Esther (Lucy Boynton) the daughter of the town’s most fervent abolitionist, Jee Hagadorn, played powerfully by Angus McFayden. In an early scene Esther renames her suitor Tom since his other name evokes the traitorous president of the Confederacy.

As Jeff and Esther grow closer, the rest of the town, led by her father, turns against the Beech family. First it was just Jee. Then, to quote Harold Frederic, “there came to be a number of them—and then, all at once, lo! everybody was an Abolitionist—that is to say, everybody but Abner Beech.” The once peaceful town falls sick with war fever and Abner is accused of everything from disloyalty to watering down the milk he sells. In one memorable scene the pastor of the town’s one church lists notable Democrats as the seven heads of the Beast from Revelation. Abner, not normally one for needless provocation—the boys in the beginning of the film only remember him resorting to violence once in their lives—walks out quoting the Beatitudes: “blessed are the peacemakers.”

In the midst of it all Jeff joins the Union army—rebelling by enlisting—to impress his future wife. So as not to spoil the movie, suffice it to say that things get worse before they get better, though on the last page of the novella Esther comes around to calling him Jeff again.

“Copperhead” is the first sympathetic take on the Northern dissenters from the Civil War in recent popular culture. We are all abolitionists in retrospect, and you need only look as far as the New York Times’ sesquicentennial remembrances to get a feel for the Copperheads’ tarnished reputation—they are “peevish and bordering on paranoid,” prone to “mystical thinking.”

Needless to say, the film’s writer and director disagree. In one of his books Kauffman describes the opposition as “honorable and deep-set in the old American grain.” Some Copperheads were indeed guilty of plotting to overthrow or withdraw from the Union, but that was not characteristic of the movement as a whole—in the film, the Beeches’ only formal expression of any political opposition is in voting for Democrats. (An act that, to be sure, almost causes a riot.)

After Maxwell’s expensive, logistically intense earlier work—which involved many historians, the consent of national parks, and thousands of reenactors—his next project after 2003’s “Gods and Generals” had to meet three strict criteria, he says. It had to “absolutely motivate me as a filmmaker,” it had to have a novel angle on the war, and it had to be economical to produce. The planned sequel to “Gettysburg” featuring the conclusion of the war is often discussed but, being another costly war epic, only meets one of Maxwell’s preconditions. “Copperhead” meets all three.

“I find it obscene that we have to, for the twentieth time in a motion picture, see the prolonged, agonizing death of Abraham Lincoln,” says Maxwell. “Spielberg does it again in his beautiful style, he’s the filmmaker of our age. But how many times do we have to be dragged through that hagiography? … The untimely death of any man is to be deplored, but what about the other seven hundred thousand?”

For Kauffman the affinity with the subject matter is even deeper. “Over the years I’ve written about anti-expansionists and loco-focos and populists and people who wanted to save the small rural schools, people who opposed the Interstate Highway System and all sorts of stuff like that,” he says, quoting William Appleman Williams’s injunction to “let us think about the people who lost.” Abner Beech is a man who lost. Moreover, Kauffman’s first novel, Every Man a King, was consciously working in the regionalist tradition of which the author of “Copperhead” is a part, and the screenwriter admits that “as an upstate New York patriot, it’s really exciting to me that we have Harold Frederic, who I think is a great American novelist, reintroduced to a lot of people who haven’t heard of him.”

Kauffman’s favorite scene in the film has the same charming admixture of localist anarchism and literary worldliness that makes his own books so entertaining. It’s an exchange between Abner and Avery, a minor character who might be called the town’s spokesman for the Union, played by Peter Fonda (an eclectic reactionary himself), recalling his father in “Young Mister Lincoln.” After Abner goes on about Lincoln’s tyrannies—imprisoning dissidents, shuttering newspapers, conscripting young men—Avery asks him, “Doesn’t the Union mean anything to you?” Avery replies: “It means something. It means more than something. But it doesn’t mean everything. My family means more to me, my farm, the corners means more. York State means more to me. Though we disagree Avery, you mean more to me than any Union.”

“That to me is the most poignant scene in the movie,” says Kauffman. “Maybe that’s just because I guess there’s a little bit of me in that particular disquisition.”

When talking about the story of “Copperhead,” both Kauffman and Maxwell are quick to invoke political ideas, so it’s a dimension that’s hard to ignore. “Obviously in one sense it’s an antiwar movie,” Kauffman says, “but if there’s a political point to the film, it’s a defense of dissent, which sounds sort of innocuous. ‘Well that’s really brave.’ But in fact films, books, theater, pieces of art, when they treat the subject they’re almost always cheating. They stack the deck, and the author flatters himself and the audience because the dissenter is always someone with whom all right-thinking people of our age agree. It’s this ‘Inherit the Wind’ bullshit, you know? It’s a cheat.”

We don’t automatically identify with Abner because he dissents from “what’s probably the sacredest cow in American history,” says Kauffman. “In that sense it’s provocative, and it’s meant to be provocative.”

“Our proclivity is to identify with the dissenter, except here the dissenter has been essentially discredited by our history,” Maxwell says. “Our official history and our received wisdom, right or wrong, is the reality. There’s a big monument on the Mall to Abraham Lincoln, he’s seated there like Zeus in a temple. So to anyone who was in the North, the Southerners were just the enemy; but anybody in the North who was against Lincoln’s war had to be either misguided or a traitor.”

The question is whether filmgoers are willing to be provoked in this way, and much of that depends on their impression of how fair the film is being to both sides. “They’re only willing to be challenged by it if the challenge is emotional and personal,” says Maxwell. “As soon as you get into any kind of didactic, manipulative scenario, an audience will reject it. I would reject it.”

The Harold Frederic novella takes itself a good deal less seriously than this movie does—it’s downright funny in parts—though the filmmakers’ circumspection makes sense in light of the sensitive subject matter, and they’re at pains to be evenhanded toward both sides. Jee, as he’s written, is a “real caricature,” says Kauffman. “We humanized him, or Angus McFayden did, who’s tremendous in that role. Jee is absolutely right about the central moral question of the age: slavery, its immorality, the need to abolish it decades ago. But he has subordinated all that’s nearest and closest to him to an abstraction.

“Abner too, to a lesser extent, suffers from Jee Hagadorn-ism, depicted most harshly in the scene when he’s getting on his soapbox again, talking about ‘tearin’ up the Constitution, making every house a house of mourning,’ and it doesn’t occur to him that his wife is sitting in the same room and thinking about her own son who’s gone, quite possibly dead. At that moment, he’s an all-forest, no-trees guy.”

Now at the tail end of a long career, Maxwell has decamped from the hubs of the film industry to the heart of Civil War country in the northern Shenandoah, on top of a mountain. He tells me about his childhood in Clifton-Passaic, New Jersey, and the “profound sense of loss” brought about by accelerated technological and cultural change.

The places that formed him as younger man are now unrecognizable. The people have moved and the landmarks are gone—the Zeta Psi frat house where he lived as a student at NYU’s old Bronx campus, gone. The Jewish community center where he used to direct plays, gone. “Garret Mountain, where we used to have picnics. Half of the mountain has been sheared away as a quarry.”

The old Metropolitan Opera House, where he first saw Wagner’s “Ring” cycle: a “jewel, a world jewel! It had the best acoustics of any room on earth, it was renowned for its acoustics, Caruso sang there, Zinka Milanov sang there. Great conductors performed there. Razed to the ground and an ugly skyscraper put up!”

The appeal of “Copperhead” very much stems from this sense of loss, and just as Kauffman and Maxwell’s life experiences and artistic pursuits drew them to the story, the average American movie-goer is primed to… not really get it. Roger Ebert wrote in his rather unkind review of “Gods and Generals” that it was a movie for people who do things other than watching movies, like reenact Civil War battles. That’s true enough; but then, who is this one for if it doesn’t even have any battles?

If nothing else, the film is a reminder that the Civil War began a process of centralization and upheaval that continues today, and to resist it is neither futile nor racist. If Lincoln’s modern critics often downplay the racial animosity his opponents tapped into, Kauffman writes, “the eulogists of Father Abraham … gloss over the extent to which the Civil War enshrined industrial capitalism, the subordination of the states to the federal behemoth, and such odiously statist innovations as conscription, the jailing of war critics, and the income tax.”

“The meaning of the war had come to inhere in its cost”—to cite Faust again—even in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which presumed to weigh the “blood drawn with the lash” against the “blood drawn by the sword” on the scales of divine justice. To question whether anyone has the authority to commit human lives to such a calculation is to know Abner Beech.

His kind of patriotism begins at home; it’s built of stronger stuff than a “Mission Accomplished” banner and can’t be embodied in a jobs bill. To the extent that those local affinities still hold power, the message of the film’s ending is hopeful. It takes a tragedy—and I won’t tell you what it is—but the fever in the Corners breaks. The community comes back. And to the extent that they don’t, we might nonetheless remember that to love thy neighbor is still a subversive act.

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49 Responses to Civil War Comes Home

the eulogists of Father Abraham … gloss over the extent to which the Civil War enshrined industrial capitalism, the subordination of the states to the federal behemoth, and such odiously statist innovations as conscription, the jailing of war critics, and the income tax.”

I always find it fascinating that people really equate income taxation with conscription or prison. For me, that’s very much “which one of these is not like the other.” But whatever.

In the abstract, I’d be interested in a movie that explores copperhead opposition to the civil war. This sounds like it may be a polemic, though. Is this so, or does the movie manage to avoid beating the viewer over the head with modern Conservativism?

I ask in part because I’m looking at an ad right now (just below your article) for the film, proclaiming it “The Pro-Constitution Movie of the Year!” Oy.

I will say I am a fan of Maxwell. Gettysburg is literally my favorite movie of all time and will continually bring me to tears, the actors really brought those men and their triumphs and losses to life. One of my favorite lines is Pickett at the end of the charge saluting to Lee and responding to Lee’s request for him to form his division, “General, I have no division.” It just kinda put the whole thing in perspective to me. People talk about the great victory at Gettysburg, but I can’t help but think of Pickett and his Virginian’s, every time.

Regardless of the lack of battle, the story described for Copperhead sounds extremely interesting; not to mention a story for our age of information and war.

Last bit, my Dad’s family is all from Utica, I bet I can get them to watch this purely based on the fact that the writer of the original story was a Utican. So there is that =D

I am looking forward to seeing the movie and I enjoy Bill Kauffman’s writing. Pat Buchanan once wrote in a column that originally only 7 of the 15 slave states seceded to be followed by 4 more after Lincoln decided on war.

Would there have been a “Civil War” if those 7 states had not seceded? Was the war really about the abolition of slavery?

@LarryS – As far as I understand the history, if there had been no secession there would have been no Civil War and slavery would have continued entrenched in the South, but probably limited from expansion beyond that region. Possibly dying off at some point in the future due to economic/social change, although given the length of time Jim Crow lasted I’m not sure that’s a given at all.

It’s clear from at least South Carolina’s declaration of secession that the states seceded to protect what they saw as a threat to their state’s rights to permit slavery, so in that sense slavery was the reason for the Civil War. However, in my view, the reason is that the South wanted to proactively defend the right to own slaves, rather than the North affirmatively seeking abolition as a core war purpose.

The movie does sound interesting, if only for the rather contrarian subject matter. Although the advert on here for “pro-Constituion movie of the year” is not doing it any favors in my eyes.

Leaving aside the fact that the Confederacy also resorted to “conscription, the jailing of war critics, and the income tax,” none of these things were “enshrined” by the war, contra Kauffman. Conscription was carried out so incompetently by the Union government that it might as well not have existed at all, the “jailing of war critics” was largely mythical (as Mark Neely explains in his book The Fate of Liberty, the majority of people jailed during the suspension of habeas corpus were either deserters or people who were actively aiding the Confederacy), and income tax was repealed less than a decade after the war ended.

“The Pro Constitution Movie of the Year” is a tagline bound to lead to the kind of boffo box office that movies like “An American Carol” got. Which is s shame, since the movie sounds interesting, regardless of one’s views on the war, Lincoln or Copperheads.

William Tecumseh Sherman was sympathetic to slaveowners in the South, prior to outbreak of civil war.

I suspect that more than a few Georgians could have done without his, uh, “sympathy” past a certain point.

The ad campaign is pretty annoying (and I think deserves a full disclosure on the part of the Editors w/r/t compensation for this column), but it was inevitable that as film marketing has gotten more tailored and specific you’d eventually have ad copy for Tenthers. This is really only the next step in evolution since The Hunger Games‘s patent anti-city, anti-federalist pitch.

Sounds great! Perhaps Mr. Maxwell’s next movie will tell the true story of the heroism of the brave Irish immigrants who resisted the war in the New York draft riots by lynching blacks and burning down orphanages and Protestant churches. Well, maybe not that…

So, how about, a movie that restores to glory the principled Southern defenders of States’ Rights, who objected fiercely to the Dred Scott decision because it forced Northern authorities to comply with legal slavery, though that institution was illegal in those authorities’ home states? Oh… there kind of weren’t any principled Southern defenders who…? Well, so it’s fictionalized a little! After all, the Harold Frederic story is fictional too.

OK then, how about Quantrill and some of his boys, like say Jesse and Frank James, back in the days when pro-and anti-slavery advocates were struggling in bloody warfare to gain new states in the West that took their side on the real issue that led to the war — slavery, of course — to gain advantage in the fight to dominate the federal government, in which struggle the South’s defeat is what really led to secession. Maxwell could make heroes out of them despite all their criminal, ummm…? What? Oh wait, you’re right. That’s already been done a few times, hasn’t it?

I’ll just stick to SANTA FE TRAIL with Ronald Reagan as Custer, thanks.

Any fool who thinks President Lincoln sits like Zeus probably shouldn’t be working in the visual arts. The memorial demonstrates the weight on Lincoln and the difficulties of his charge. While it is fine to show histories losers (and American cinema has glorified the Confederacy), there should be some honesty in the portrayal including the financial benefits accruing to New York as a result of American slavery. The movie’s tag line demonstrates exactly the type of wacko the film is being marketed to.

Rob: how is it surprising that we “equate taxation with . . . prison” when the end result of refusing to pay one’s taxes is BEING FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM ONE’S HOME AND LIFE, THROWN IN PRISON, AND FORCIBLY KEPT THERE. That is not an opinion, but a fact.

James Canning: it may be too bad that more Northerners did not support a negotiated settlement with the South rather than war, but how can we ever say it’s too bad that more Northerners weren’t “sympathetic to slaveowners.”

Slaveowners engaged in one of the most immoral, disgusting practices ever known to man: treating another man as an animal and an object, buying and selling fellow men like cattle, and controlling a fellow man’s life and labor by violence and the threat of violence.

Even those of us who don’t buy the lincoln-worshipping pro-war conventional view, should have ZERO “sympathy” with slaveowners. If there is a Hell, every slaveowner should be there.

Fulton and Larry S, yeah, sort of. After the original seven states seceded, there was a sort of movement by the border states to form some some sort of third way, either through neutrality, a negotiated peaceful separation, or a negotiated peaceful reunification. It was a complete non-starter. Maryland leaned rebel, and the United States had to occupy Maryland as Baltimore was the only link between DC and the rest of the United States. Rebel sympathizers burned a railroad bridge in IIRC, March 1861 cutting off the capital for a while. This was while the rebels and the US government were both waiting for the other side to start firing first, so they could gain the moral high ground.

Anabaptist Christian communities, such as Mennonites, Amish and Brethren, were universally opposed to both slavery and war, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and participated for neither North or South.

Any war is fundamentally horrible, but Ta-Nehisi Coates may have said it best, when it comes to this particular war:

“I do not believe that saving lives and limbs of any people–white or black–to be a disreputable goal. But I refuse to lose sight of the fact that slavery was, itself, war. And the lives and limbs of black people were perpetually at stake for centuries. From 1860 to 1865 the rest of the country received a concentrated dose of that medicine which black people had been made to quaff for over two and a half centuries. It is now a century and a half later, but still in some corners of white America it is fashionable to remain embittered.”

Re: how is it surprising that we “equate taxation with . . . prison” when the end result of refusing to pay one’s taxes is BEING FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM ONE’S HOME AND LIFE, THROWN IN PRISON, AND FORCIBLY KEPT THERE. That is not an opinion, but a fact.

Which can happen as a result of refusing to obey quite a few laws. Do you object to the state having the means to enforce its laws? Laws which, in the US, and however imperfectly, reflect the will of the people?
I thought this was a conservative site, not Anarchists United.

“the eulogists of Father Abraham … gloss over the extent to which the Civil War enshrined industrial capitalism, the subordination of the states to the federal behemoth, and such odiously statist innovations as conscription, the jailing of war critics, and the income tax.”

The Lincoln eulogists also ignore his support, even into the Civil War, of repatriation of emancipated slaves to Africa or the Caribbean. Lincoln and many other Northerners, abolitionist and otherwise, opposed slavery in large part because of the degradation that the institution caused white people, particularly of the lower classes. (Note: to be fair, there is one itty bitty line of dialogue in Spielberg’s Lincoln which alludes to this POV.) “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” — free white men, that is, living in a relatively egalitarian, culturally cohesive, small-r republican nation-state. A worthy aspiration, if you ask me, but one reviled today in our more enlightened, diversity-celebrating, plutocratic age.

As for the “statist innovations,” I have to raise objections similar to others raised above. The income tax is not explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, and indeed even the 1895 Supreme Court ruling in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust, which banned “unapportioned” “direct taxes” on interest and rent income, did not invalidate Congress’ power to impose “indirect” taxation on wage or corporate income.

As for conscription, the practice had been employed long before the Civil War by colonies and later states to fill the ranks of militias — how’s that for localism! President Madison, with his Secretary of War Monroe — Southern slaveowners both — suggested national conscription for the War of 1812; the idea was not enacted in part due to fierce opposition from antiwar Yankees such as Daniel Webster. Notice how it is not prohibited by the Constitution either.

On a personal note, as a veteran of our Empire’s misadventure in Iraq, I have contradictory views on conscription. Militarily it is a bad idea, at least in this hyper-individualist day and age: volunteer soldiers do not want to share a foxhole (or Humvee, nowadays) with a malcontent who does not want to give his all in service. Politically, however, conscription is a right and necessary practice: it creates shared sacrifice that forces the public and their elected officials to take seriously the costs of war. (I would throw in tax increases to pay for war rather than Bushie nothing-down 100% financing as necessary to curb our imperial overreach.)

Slaveowners should have pushed for Lincoln’s programme of buying out their ownership interests.

Manumission would have acknowledged that human beings were property. Even if Lincoln was amenable to such a despicable thing, his Republican base would never have supported such a thing, nor would the government have authorized such expenditure — it’s easy to pay for war once people are shooting at each other, it’s quite a bit more difficult to pay for what would amount to little more than preemptive reparations to slaveowners.

This also ignores the fact that many southerners were unwilling to “sell out” their children’s “right” to own slaves. Slavery was a positive cultural value, as many of the secessionist would tell you, slavery stood at the very foundation of southern culture and economy, and they believed that a south without slavery was unthinkable.

This movie is particularly relevant today as the U.S. Military Commision’s prosecutors have fallen back on old Civil War military commissions to justify as “war crimes,” non-war crime offenses but offenses of disloyalty in the non-Confederate states. It is logical to believe if there are ever military commissions under Sec. 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, these Civil War precedents will be invoked as precedent, just as they are in the Commissions. Offenses listed in a filing by government prosecutors is “publicly expressing hostility to the U.S. government or sympathy with the enemy . . . ” and “Impeding enlistements.” We still have this provision waiting to be used perhaps in 18 U.S.C. Sec. 2388, which provides: Whoever, when the United States is at war, willfully causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, . . . in the military or naval forces of the United States, or willfully obstructs the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States . . . .

Rob: how is it surprising that we “equate taxation with . . . prison” when the end result of refusing to pay one’s taxes is BEING FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM ONE’S HOME AND LIFE, THROWN IN PRISON, AND FORCIBLY KEPT THERE. That is not an opinion, but a fact.

First, that’s several steps down the road – you basically have to want that to happen in order to make it happen. Or haven’t you seen all those commercials on TV from oh so helpful lawyers offering to settle your tax liabilities for pennies on the dollar?

Second, if the income tax was abolished tomorrow, it would still be criminal to dodge other taxes. But income taxes in particular really rile some folks up.

Our government sets tax rates according to a political process. We elect representatives and they vote on the measure. You don’t have to like the result any more than I do (I’m not a fan of our current tax code, and would love to see a number of changes made). But you’re not being treated like a criminal, or a draftee in time of war. You are being treated as a citizen, with both rights and responsibilities.

This is going to be a movie worth seeing, and I expect to enjoy it and be challenged by it. But the presentation here is a bit hagiographic.

My great-great-grandfather was a Jefferson-Jackson Democrat from east Tennessee. Those of you who know history know what comes next from the “east” part. He fought in the 11th Tennessee Cavalry, United States Army, just as soon as Andrew Johnson could be installed as military governor and commission the regiment. He recalled, so says my aunt, the last of her generation still living, that Andrew Jackson threatened to hang John C. Calhoun from the highest tree in South Carolina if he attempted secession, because “the United States is a government, not a league.”

After Abner goes on about Lincoln’s tyrannies—imprisoning dissidents, shuttering newspapers, conscripting young men That’s overdone too. When Ambrose Burnside shut down the Chicago Daily News, Lincoln revoked the order, and when a delegation to the White House urged him to shut down a few more, he lectured them on the importance of respecting the liberties of the people. Lincoln’s administration resorted to conscription a full year after the confederacy, for an obvious reason: young southern men weren’t interested in putting their lives, fortunes, or sacred honor on the line for secession, unless a recruiter put a gun to their head. Southern newspaper editors were apoplectic about the lack of patriotism.

It would be nice if Maxwell made a movie about Jones County, Alabama next, but I’m not holding my breath. The movie “Gods and Generals” was a gross distortion of the book, in that the movie reduced Robert E. Lee to a two-dimensional stereotyped caricature of himself, devoted half the movie to the caricature, whitewashed Thomas Jackson into a loveable character, and barely had room left for Hancock and Chamberlain.

“we might nonetheless remember that to love thy neighbor is still a subversive act.”

The more subversive act is to treat our neighbor as we would be treated. The failure to do this was the core immorality of US slavery. There wasn’t a single slave master in the antebellum US who would have switched places with their slaves; or who would have wished to be treated by others as they treated their own slaves. We talk so much about the great suffering and death brought about by the Civil War. Why do we talk so much less about the suffering and death that occurred during slavery? Why do we get a movie about Copperheads when we still don’t have a movie about Tubman? Crickets chirping….

The Lincoln eulogists also ignore his support, even into the Civil War, of repatriation of emancipated slaves to Africa or the Caribbean

Huh. You must have read different books than I have. Every time I’ve read a book (or blogger) who is generally positive about Lincoln, his support for resettlement schemes comes up, examples of bigotry in his speeches come up…

Lincoln was genuinely flumoxed at times as to how to manage the end of slavery. He dabbled in this, pondered that, and I’m not sure he really had decided on a course of action by the time he was shot.

As for free labor/free soil – yes, and again, this is brought up by reputable historians even if they take a positive view of Lincoln, the GOP, and the war. Certainly at the outset of the war, anti-slavery sentiment was about a combination of political power (“slave power” pushin’ us around – see Fugitive Slave Act), labor power (competing with slave labor, yikes!) and vague discomfort at the ickiness of slavery, which pretty clearly ran 3rd for many if not most folks. Very few were with Thaddeus Stevens in the total equality bucket. This was not static throughout the war, but sure, even after the war White Supremacy was still the norm. This is supposed to be surprising to who, exactly?

Rob in CT – – Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln saw the huge problem freeing the slaves would cause, due to increased competition for white artisans and workers. And social problems. Clay was the head of the organisation that sought to send freed slaves to Africa.

If the reviews are right, the movie is a bigger lie than anything Ron Maxwell objects to in anybody else’s version of history. In his film, the copperhead, Abner Beech, turns out to part of the Underground Railroad, secretly helping slaves make their way to freedom in Canada: “Abner Beech hated slavery, but he loved the U.S. Constitution more.”

Nonsense. In the original 1893 novel, Beech is no opponent of slavery. His hatred of abolitionists goes hand in glove with a support for slavery, and he — like most people back then (only more so) — is what we’d call a racist today. That was true to the stories of a great many — probably most — copperheads, but Maxwell, in his great wisdom sees fit to falsify the record.

I suppose the thinking was that someone who opposed emancipation and feared miscegenation wouldn’t make a fit hero for today’s audiences. But if Maxwell cared about the truth and had any guts, he’d have given it a try and seen how far he could get with such a clearly flawed hero — or he’d have revised his views and turned down his rhetoric.

A lot of us have gone through a Bill Kauffman phase — believing in some master idea or value that is always true and always gives the right answer to every historical dilemma. Sadly, though, life’s not so simple. Doesn’t even a very brief overview of Jefferson’s own career reveal that “Jeffersonianism” isn’t the answer to all political problems?

“Nonsense. In the original 1893 novel, Beech is no opponent of slavery. His hatred of abolitionists goes hand in glove with a support for slavery, and he — like most people back then (only more so) — is what we’d call a racist today.”

Okay, I read through this fast, but it seems to me that Abner Beech doesn’t so much support slavery, as fight against the abolitionists who want to drag his town, county, and state to war. It was they, influenced by New Englanders, that started to claim that the bible supported abolition. Beach fought back, with bible versus supporting slavery (of which there are many).

“Okay, I read through this fast, but it seems to me that Abner Beech doesn’t so much support slavery, as fight against the abolitionists who want to drag his town, county, and state to war.”

M_Young: The narrator relates his conversations with Beech: “It took me a long time to even ap-
proximately grasp the wickedness of these
new men, who desired to establish negro
sovereignty in the Republic, and to compel
each white girl to marry a black man.”

He tells of the congregation’s reaction to Beech: “But when our church-going community
had reached the conclusion that a man
couldn’t be a Christian and hold such views
on the slave question as Beech held, it was
only a very short step to the conviction that
such a man would water his milk.”

Harold Fredric wasn’t going to have Beech praising slavery on every page. That wasn’t his goal. He had much sympathy with his hero and the man’s sufferings. But he made it quite clear where Beech stood on the question.

Sure, there’s a some talk about the war and how horrible it is. In the novel, Beech doesn’t refrain from using the n-word, though, attacking his opponents on two occasions as lovers or worshipers of the Negro (though “Negro” isn’t the word he uses).

I’m not going to speculate on what Beech’s deepest motivation was. Who could say with any authority (all the more so since he’s a fictional character)? But in the book he’s certainly not part of the Underground Railroad, and (whatever else he is) it would be hard to deny that his attitudes were racist by today’s standards.

This is all so much malarkey. The greatest American since the generation of the founding fathers was John Brown. The fact that his birthday is not a national holiday, and the states of the traitors Lee and Stonewall are allowed to exist speaks volumes about the moral depravity of the United States of America.

Ed — none of those statements constitutes support for slavery, if by support of slavery one means thinking it a positive good and wanting to see it spread. Harold’s Beech seems to be more concerned with the political (and genetic!) implications of abolition. In other words, he isn’t John C. Calhoun.

As I’ve pointed out on other threads, unionist Oregon actually banned blacks from settling in its territory. A lot of free soilers wanted to keep the soil free — of blacks. Beech’s attitudes seem similar to these, though perhaps a little more extreme, egged on by the radicalism of many of the abolitionists. I must say, in light of the way the largely white press and white college kids went ga-ga over Obama in 2008, it seems that some things never change.

OTOH, I gotta agree that making Beech part of the underground railroad is something of a cheap out, if Maxwell does that. Not really a lie, in that I don’t think that movie directors are required to follow novels by long dead authors to the letter. And how many movies about Lincoln highlight his views on black equality with whites, and his support for ‘colonization’?

“None of those statements constitutes support for slavery, if by support of slavery one means thinking it a positive good and wanting to see it spread. Harold’s Beech seems to be more concerned with the political (and genetic!) implications of abolition. In other words, he isn’t John C. Calhoun.”

M_Young: That’s a very rigorous standard. I suspect many Confederates — many supporters of secession, slavery expansion, and slavery, even — didn’t view slavery as “positive good.” They were scared of emancipation and what it would mean. And that perhaps more immediately (in terms of physical insecurity and violence) and even “genetically” (in terms of race-mixing) than politically (in terms of constitutional questions and political power). In their eyes, expanding slavery and fighting for it were ways of preventing the racial apocalypse. For every Calhoun or Fitzhugh who celebrated slavery as a “positive good” there were more who just didn’t want either to compete with Blacks or to have free Blacks living among them in freedom.

You’ll doubtless say that this was Oregon’s view, even Lincoln’s. I’d say such racial feelings were a given at the time. They were widespread. But people reached a point where they had to decide what to do — how to rank their various concerns and values and decide which side to support. The modern libertarian liar’s point of view is that anyone concerned about liberty and the Constitution would oppose Lincoln. In fact, that wasn’t the case. If one believed strongly enough in the union and believed secession to be unconstitutional one might well support Lincoln and the war. Copperheads like the fictional Beech or the real Clement Vallandigham did have stronger racial concerns which were one real reason why they opposed the war.

In any case, there was a continuum. There were differences between those who actually fought for the Confederacy and those who didn’t like the war for the union. Expecting people in either group to go as far as Calhoun or absolving them for not going that far, is probably unrealistic and not reflective of what was actually going on at the time.

This is something that goes down to a few decades ago. When Senators like Stennis or Eastland or Russell or Earvin or Byrd proclaimed themselves Jeffersonian Democrats and friends of the Constitution and freedom, you had to take that with a very large grain of salt. So it was with the Copperheads and Peace Democrats and Confederates of a century before.

A lot of this is playing “what if-s”
The fact is that the South wanted to secede if Lincoln was elected. He was and they did. They forcibly seized federal armories, ended up firing on Fort Sumter.
All the arguments for secession can be traced back to slavery and not much else.
Btw., by 1860 there were 4+ million slaves in the country, most confederate states had a slave population of 30-40…50 %. They were not going to go anywhere.

I would disagree about the ‘large grain of salt’ required to deal with Stennis or Earvin (I notice you leave off Fulbright). The modern Civil Rights movement did a lot of damage to my ability to associate with whom I want, sell to whom I want. Hire whom I want.

“After Abner goes on about Lincoln’s tyrannies—imprisoning dissidents, shuttering newspapers, conscripting young men That’s overdone too. When Ambrose Burnside shut down the Chicago Daily News, Lincoln revoked the order, and when a delegation to the White House urged him to shut down a few more, he lectured them on the importance of respecting the liberties of the people.”

Having pointed out in a post above that today’s Military Commission’s prosecutors have gone back and rehabilitated the practice of “placing the military authorities above the civil,” as we complained of on the 4th of July in 1776, it is a dangerous fiction that Pres. Lincoln did not play a role in the suppression of speech and the press. A casual reading of COL William Winthrop and William Whiting, Solicitor General of the War Department, as well as reading Lincoln’s declaration of martial law in September 1862 would show other wise.

But let me be clear, suppression of the North’s civil liberties cannot be compared to the inherent totalitarianism of slavery; slavery is the ultimate totalitarianism, with the total arbitrariness of the slaveholder determining the very existence of the slave. Only the deliberate extermination of a people exceeds it. And as we know, the South did not have a monopoly on those forms of totalitarianism.

In Lincoln’s defense, he was locked in a vast Civil War, an actual existential threat to the nation, unlike today when we are, at most, confronted with “sporadic attacks,” something other than “war” according to Army doctrine of pre-9/11 and Dick Cheney.

But by falsifying the military oppression in the north, and the expansive view of “war treason,” which took in speech which might only have the tendency of “embarrassing the government,” a frequent charge, is to beg for it to happen again.

Always keep in mind when discussing slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War that the Union included 4 slave states – Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky. And, of course, the Nation’s Capital was a slave area as well.

In the end, it was all about the right of States to secede from the Federal Union. In the near future, this well may be revisited.

Liberals seem willing enough to condemn Committees of Safety and paper money, but not the same in abolitionism. As Tocqueville, pointed out: “It is true that in [aristocratic] ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men. In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed….”